mahabharat

Episode 91 - We get treated to a last handful of the Final Teachings, and then Bhisma dies.  The poor guy set quite an objective for himself.  It must have been mid autumn when he was shot through with arrows, yet he clung to life until the Winter Solstice before finally giving up the ghost. He says he lived on the bed of arrows for a total of 58 days.

Following his death, Yuddistira has another one of his fits of sorrow & regret, but he's snapped out of it by hearing a story about how the ancient king Marutta left a pile of gold in the mountains as part of his Ashwamedha sacrifice.  Yuddistira needs this gold, since his treasury was depleted by the war, and now everyone is telling him he needs to perform a super-expensive sacrifice!

Episode 90 - A few more stories from Bhisma's final teachings.  We learn that Vyasa had a son, named Suka, who really did not seem to be pleased to be born.  And Bhisma himself tells us what he really thinks of Buddhist philosophy!

Episode 89 - For some reason, the first three full-fledged stories from the Anusasana Parva all center around a Banian tree.  They also share the theme of low-caste hunters and their cruelty.   Remarkably, in the 2nd story the three characters are all saved, but all three die violently.  In the 3rd story, the Brahmin Gautama is an unreformed scoundrel, but he is brought back to life!

Episode 88 - This episode begins the voluminous Last Teachings of Bhisma.  As Bhisma lies on his bed of arrows, the Pandavas, Krishna & Satyaki gather around to listen.  Yuddistira poses the questions, which mostly revolve around Dharma and kingship, and Bhisma answers.

These teachings are exceptionally difficult to convey in the form of a podcast, mostly because they are so boring.  There are very few stories, and most of the stories revolve around conversations in which one character instructs the other on good behavior.  I have tried to extract the more interesting details from the book, and I included the most interesting of the stories.  Hopefully this is enough to convey the nature of this part of the epic, which makes up nearly a third of the entire text!

Episode 87 - Yuddistira is finally convinced that he should remain king, and he gets down to business.  He marches straight to the palace and has himself anointed and consecrated.  He appoints his council and gets his kingdom in order.  As soon as he has a chance to catch his breath, Krishna suggests that they hurry over to uncle Bhisma, who isn't long for this world.

Along the way, Krishna tells the story of Battleaxe Rama, who wiped out the race of Kshatriyas 21 times in succession.

The podcast may be taking something of a hiatus after this episode.  We are now entering the section of the Mahabharata that is dedicated to Bhisma's teaching on Dharma.  This constitutes nearly one-third of the entire text, and from what I've seen so far, is extremely legalistic and detailed.  This means I will need to pour over a lot of text to extract enough information to make a full episode.  That may take a while.

On the positive side, once we are through this section of Bhisma's teachings, we are almost at the end of the story!

Thanks for sticking with me on this long journey.  I'll be sure to keep you posted as things develop.  Just keep watching this blog!

Episode 86 - It seems like Yuddistira always had a secret desire to give up the world and live like a sadhu.  But now he has a pretty good justification-- after all, he even killed his elder brother.  Crimes like this demand extreme penance, and Yuddistira would like nothing better than to embrace that lifestyle.

No one else agrees with the new king however, and his brothers, Krishna, and the Rishis all take turns trying to convince him that the best use of his life would be to take up the crown and rule, according to his dharma.

They never quite seem to convince him, but Krishna and Narada at least manage to distract him with a story of a boy who crapped gold nuggets (Suvarnashthivin).  Also, Yuddistira has learned to always obey Krishna, and Krishna is adamant that he take up the throne and rule.  

Episode 85 - We begin the Book of Peace, the Shanti Parva.  After boasting to his uncle about his special clairvoyant powers, Yuddistira is blindsided by the news that he & Karna shared the same mother.  Now the Dharma Raja has learned that he killed his own brother-- aside from killing one's parents, perhaps one of the worst things a person could do.

The brothers spend a month outside in the city walls as a sort of penance, and are joined by the great sages of the ancient world.  Narada comforts the brothers by telling stories of Karna's past.  The sage argues that Karna's life & circumstances were custom-designed to spark this war and ensure its completion.

We finally learn of Karna's tutelage under Rama Jamadagnya (Parasurama), and we get the story of how he was cursed for killing a Brahmin's cow.  

Episode 84 - Vidur & Vyasa tell a few parables to help Dhrtarastra pull himself together.  When the king is finally pacified, he leads all the bereaved women of Hastinapur in a great procession to deal with their fallen men.  They march along the banks of the Ganga to Kurukshetra, where they encounter Ashwatthaman, Krpa & Krtavarman, who are still on the run after killing the Pandava's sons & allies.

Ashwatthaman heads of to Vyasa's ashram, Krpa goes home to Hastinapur, and Krtavarman also heads for home.

The procession later meets up with the Pandavas, fresh from Ashwatthaman's downfall, and together they proceed to the battlefield.  Following the great cremation, a memorial is conducted on the banks of the Ganga.  Kunti joins in and tells her sons to honor their fallen brother-- this is the first time the Pandavas were told they had a brother!

Episode 83 - The brothers learn of the massacre of their sons & allies, and summon Draupadi to break the news.  As usual, all she wants is revenge.  Thus the Pandavas go off on one final mission to avenge the death of their sons.  They track down Ashwatthaman and find him hanging out with Vyasa and Narada.  As soon as they set eyes on each other, the boy Brahmin sets off his Brahmashira weapon, which is 100s of times more powerful than the Brahmastra, and sounds a lot like a hydrogen bomb-- "All living things are destroyed and no rains fall for 12 years."

The Rishis step in and order Arjun to put his guns away, but Ashwatthaman cannot retract this weapon once it is unleashed, so instead, he turns it loose on the wombs of the Pandava women, making them sterile and killing their one remaining heir-- Uttara's unborn son Parikshit.

Fortunately, Krishna revives the kid, but there shall be no more Pandava offspring after this.

To help explain how Ashwatthaman was able to pull off this massacre single-handedly, Krishna tells a few stories about Shiva, and just how temperamental and dangerous he can be.  In fact, Shiva really comes off as more of a force of nature than a Saddhu living in the hills.

My guess is, that if we understood the physics of Time, we might realize that Shiva stands in for one of the main functions of time, which is change.  The other aspects of time are novelty (Brahma), and the moment of Now, which I believe is represented by Vishnu.

Episode 82 - Well, it seems there is no end to the tit for tat revenge cycle that Duryodhana forced into motion so long ago.  Now that he has been defeated, his survivors seek revenge for his fall.  Ashwatthaman is unable to let it go, and since he is vastly outnumbered, he prays to Shiva for the power to kill his enemies.  Shiva allows him to exterminate the remains of the Pandava army while they sleep.  So now there will be another vendetta.  How much further can this go?  Find out next time!

Episode 81 - So this is it; the moment everyone has been waiting for.  Ever since Episode 7 when Duryodhana was born, he has finally received his well-deserved defeat.  But even as he falls, the finger pointing, hand-wringing and grief at the price that has been paid for this victory has already begun.

Balaram shows up just in time to referee the final death match between Bhima & Duryodhana, only to get really annoyed when Bhima is forced to bend the rules a bit in order to win.

Episode 80 - This episode covers the final day of the great war.  If you were expecting things to go out with a bang, you'll be disappointed.  Once the Kaurava general Shalya is killed, things just sort of disintegrate.  Duryodhana's remaining brothers are all killed.  Shakuni is killed.  Karna's sons are exterminated.  The Pandavas make one final sweep over the field, killing literally everyone who was left standing.  They spend the rest of the day sifting through the corpses in search of Duryodhana.

By this point, the only survivors are Krpa, Aswatthaman, Kritavarman, Sanjay, & Duryodhana.  Everyone else is dead.  The Pandavas still have their tight group of heroes and Draupadi's sons, but most of their troops are dead.

Duryodhana finds himself standing alone, abandoned & on foot in the midst of the battlefield.  Everyone is dead or has fled the scene.  Stunned, he wanders off the field and makes his way aimlessly towards Hastinapur.  Sanjay finds his prince, filthy in blood & gore, in a state of shock, standing by a lake shore.  When the Kaurava finally comes to his senses, he submerges himself into the lake, where he intends to rest, indefinitely.

Aside from Duryodhana, blind king Dhrtarastra still has one son yet living.  It is his illegitimate son Yuyutsu, who had joined with the Pandavas at the beginning of the war.  He is given leave to comfort his brothers' retainers & womenfolk and returns with them to Hastinapur.  There are no recriminations for his having gone over to the enemy.  Now they are just glad that some one son of Dhrtarastra has survived to carry on the line.

Episode 79 - This is a big day in the war.  Bhisma fulfills one of his oaths by killing Dushasan and drinking his blood.  Now he will be gunning for Duryodhana.

Arjun & Karna finally get busy with their final showdown.  The whole universe apparently took sides in this conflict, with everyone choosing a champion to cheer for.  The pair begin fighting with conventional weapons, but soon escalate to magical weapons.

At one point, Arjun gets the upper hand, and strikes Karna until he's lost his wits and drops his weapons. Arjun then allows his opponent to recover somewhat before they resume fighting.  Krishna scolds Arjun (not for the first time!), for failing to strike the enemy when he's down.  Arjun has quit arguing with Krishna over these things, so he resolves to kill Karna at the next possible opportunity.

At this point, Fate and Mother Earth have had enough and they intervene directly.  Mother Earth seizes Karna's chariot wheel, bringing her enemy to a halt.  Karna jumps down to pull free the wheel, but it won't budge.  He asks Arjun to think of the Warrior Code, or his Dharma, and not to fire until he could fix his chariot and get moving again.

This annoys Krishna, who scolds Karna for even bringing up the subject of Dharma.  Where was his Dharma when Draupadi was molested?  This speech both shames Karna and enrages Arjun, who finally obeys Krishna's orders and kills his enemy.

There's that wheel again!  What does it mean that in the course of this war, we've had a Wheel Formation (that killed Abhimanyu), and Arjun's son dies using a Chariot wheel as his only weapon, and then Karna dies, clinging to a wheel which was stuck in the earth.  Is there some deeper meaning to the image of a wheel in this war?

Episode 78 - Karna begins the 17th day of the war by fighting each Pandava except Arjun.  He is actually defeated by both Yuddistira and Bhima, but then he defeats Nakul and Sahadev.   Both of the elder brothers spare his life, out of consideration for Arjun's oaths.  Yuddistira then goes for a second round with Karna, but this time it doesn't work out so well.

Karna defeats Yuddistira and nearly captures him, but he reconsiders and lets the Pandava go.  Yuddistira then flees to his camp to have his wounds tended to, and there he slips into a strange funk.  What follows seems completely bogus to me.  Arjun retreats to the camp to check on his brother's health, and Yuddistira perversely assumes that he must have already killed Karna.

Yuddistira admits that he's been terrified of Karna and hasn't slept for 13 years out of fear for him. When he finds out that Karna isn't killed, he gets really mad at Arjun and suggests that Arjun hand his bow to Krishna and that they change places.  Arjun takes great exception to this, and pulls an oath out of his ass that he says he swore when he was younger.  This oath was to kill anyone who suggested that he give up his Gandiva bow.  So now he must kill Yuddistira.

Pretty lame, eh?  Krishna is there, and he does his usual thing, by coming up with a "workaround", in which Arjun need only insult his brother, then brag about himself.

Episode 77 - Drona is dead and a new commander is needed.  Ashwatthaman proposes that Karna be given the position and everyone else agrees.  Karna leads the army through a rather desultory day of fighting and then complains that what he is missing is a good driver.  Shalya is drafted to be his charioteer.
Shalya had promised to cause trouble should things come to this pass, and he lives up to it by constantly bickering with Karna.  For some reason, Karna chooses this moment to confess how he deceived Rama Jamadagnya in order to obtain the Brahma weapon.  When Rama finds out Karna is just a Suta disguised as a Brahmin, he curses Karna.

Episode 76 - I present my wild theories and hypotheses about the Mahabharata.  Among other things, we discuss its relationship to the Precession of the Equinoxes and the Yuga cycle as defined by Markandeya and Sri Yukteshvar.  We look into the role of magic in the story and our prospects for regaining this lost knowledge in the future. We delve into the mystery of the metaphysical origins of the Pandavas and consider whether the five brothers might have originally been based on just a single hero-- the proto-Arjun.

Episode 75 - Earlier in day 15, Drona is killed by Dhrstadyumna.  The Kaurava army literally comes unraveled until Ashwatthaman hears the news.  The boy is outraged at the way his father was treated and swears revenge on both Dhrstadyumna (for killing him), and Yuddistira (for betraying his trust).

Drona's son then pulls the army together and rushes to battle waving his WMD.  First he tries to use the Narayana weapon, but Krishna is too tricky for that-- he knows its weakness, which is that it is ineffective against unarmed men.  The Pandavas all drop their weapons and the bomb is a dud.  One other problem with the Narayana weapon: it's only good for one shot.  So much for that.

Next, he pulls out his Agneya weapon, which is pretty much like a thermonuclear device.  Without a second thought, he gets into range with Arjun and sets the thing off.  It wipes out perhaps half of the Pandavas' remaining army, but Arjun & Krishna simply brush off the ashes and resume fighting.  Not even nukes can take out the incarnated Rishis Nar & Narayan!


Finally, we find a funny reference to Sanjay rushing back to Hastinapur to report on the war.  What happened to his divine vision?  My guess is that originally the author had him running back & forth from the battle to the palace to report to the king what had happened.  This proved to be too limiting for the author's desires, so he switched the premise to include divine sight.  But then he forgot to expunge the earlier device from the books he'd already written! 

Episode 74 - Two significant deaths this episode-- first Gatotkacha basically gets sacrificed by Krishna so that Arjun need not face Karna's special unstoppable Indra Dart.  It's a mean trick, but Krishna explained that one of the purposes of this war is to eradicate the race of Rakshasas, so if they didn't have Karna kill him, then they would have had to do it themselves.  Besides, it was a small price to pay in order to save Arjun for the final showdown.

The second big shot to go down is their old guru Drona.  I must confess that I never really took a shine to this fighting brahmin.  He always seemed over-proud and a bit prickly.  Also, I never liked the way he manipulated the Pandava kids into fighting his own grudge match with King Drupad.  After he took half of Drupad's kingdom, he said that they could be friends again.  Some friend-- he then kills Drupad earlier in the day without a second thought.

And what the hell is a brahmin doing fighting anyway?  They are supposed to merit their honor of being the priestly caste by dedicating their lives to ritual and spirituality.   But here's this guy who demands the highest honor for being from the priestly caste, and yet he fights dirty-- in ways that a kshatriya would be ashamed to fight, such as using magic weapons against footsoldiers.  His ounce of loyalty goes to the guys who feed him & pay him, and all the rest of his love is for his own skin, and that of his dear son, Ashvatthaman.  More on that punk later.

Man, I really don't like Drona!

Anyway, next time we'll find out what Ashwatthaman does when he hears the news.

Episode 73 - We continue with the events of the 14th day of war.  You can relax because we find out that both Satyaki and Bhim made it to Arjun's side, and everyone is OK after all.  Arjun finally spots Jayadratha, but he is very well protected, and the sun is about to set.  It is time for one of Krishna's tricks!

Following Jayadratha's "exploding head syndrome", the Kauravas are so bent out of shape that they ignore the sunset and just keep fighting.   Next episode will cover the night battle of the 14th day.

Thanks for all your nice comments.  I love to hear from you!  If you haven't already, please visit my blog at mahabharatapodcast.com and leave a message.

Episode 72 - We begin the 14th day of the war.  The morning starts with many dark omens, but no one is quite sure for which side they portend doom.  Arjun sets off immediately to fight his way through the Kaurava army and to find and kill the miserable king Jayadratha.  He & Krishna soon disappear into the hordes while Yuddistira struggles to avoid capture at the hands of Drona.

By mid-day, with no news from the two Krishnas, Yuddistira begins to worry about them.  He hears their conches and interprets the sound to have some urgency.  Eventually, his concerns are too much, and he sends Satyaki, his very best bodyguard, off on a solo mission to find and rescue their kinsmen.

Then Satyaki also crashes through the enemy lines and disappears.  Not long after, the lack of news from either Satyaki or the Krishnas again proves too much for Yuddistira's nerves.  This time, he sends Bhima away to find the others.

Now Yuddistira has only Dhrstadyumna to protect him, and the rest of his very best fighters are lost and alone, deep in the hordes of the Kaurava army.

This was all too much to fit into a single episode, so we need to wait until next time to find out how the 14th day comes to a close.  Will Satyaki and Bhima make it through?  Will Arjun complete his vow to kill Jayadratha before sunset?  Find out next time!